We all remember the big historic moments of our lives. The day President Kennedy was killed. The first moon landing. President Nixon resigning. The Challenger tragedy. 9/11.

But historic shifts aren’t just momentous, singular events. More often, they are the accumulation of many smaller changes that we barely notice at the time. It’s only in retrospect — our future history books — in which we are able to see these disparate events as actually having been connected.

In that spirit, let’s connect some dots happening in our own time:

• Allegations that the IRS targeted some conservative groups for special scrutiny was not a singular, isolated event. It is part of a much broader pattern of that agency’s abusive cultural climate. One recent poll of IRS employees showed that a majority believe it is OK to lie to Congress. The IRS has immense, virtually unchecked power. That power is now expanding since the IRS is the agency in charge of enforcing ObamaCare, including the mandate that everyone buy health insurance, or face a tax penalty. The growth of the IRS’ influence in our daily lives combined with its abusive attitude toward citizens is a dangerous trend for the future.

• Revelations that the NSA and other national spy agencies are compiling all our phone and email records is another abuse of federal power. It’s one thing for our spy agencies to target foreign citizens who are suspected of terrorism, but to wholesale gather info on millions of innocent U.S. citizens is something different. And like the IRS, the NSA seems to have no problem lying about what it is doing. The NSA leader recently lied at a Congressional hearing. When he was caught and later interviewed about it, his excuse was that he had responded to the question with the “least untruthful” answer. To think that the NSA won’t someday abuse its power and vast store of information is wishful fantasy. It’s just a matter of time.

• Along with the NSA abuse, we have come to accept our Homeland Security agencies as being necessary. But there’s something frightening about an agency that encourages citizens to spy on each other. We’ve all seen the signs: “If you see something, say something.” That’s the same message that was pervasive in Nazi Germany and in the former Soviet Union and allied nations. We half undress to go through airports now in what is little more than a grand theater. It’s not real security, but rather a pretense of security designed to make us feel better. It’s for show, not substance. And yet, so many people are willing to trade personal freedom for this fake sense of security.

• Immigration reform efforts have stalled, despite the fact that everyone knows the system is broken. One of the reasons the move to reform the system isn’t moving is the idea that the border with Mexico needs to be more secure. In effect, Republicans in the House want to build a Berlin Wall across our southern border, militarizing the area in a way that we’ve never done before. While that is a popular idea, it’s impossible to do without spending millions and even billions of dollars in the coming years and it won’t fix the overall broken immigration system. But we aren’t Israel. Mexico isn’t lobbing bombs across the border into Texas or Southern California. The idea that we need to militarize a border to that extent is a concept that is frightening and shows a major shift in how this nation views its neighbors and the rest of the world.

• Our culture has shifted into immense shallowness. Celebrity culture dominates not just television, but even the purveyors of “news.” Look at just about any website of a large metro newspaper and mostly what you will see is celebrity fluff. The purveyors of “news” on television have fallen into partisan bickering with editing designed to mislead viewers. Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of this slice-and-dice journalism. Real, thoughtful reporting has virtually disappeared from just about every news medium and Americans are among the most ill-informed people on earth.

• Along with that cultural shift has been the replacement of real friends with fake online “friends.” That’s not just with Facebook, but with how many people interact with the world today. Reality has been replaced by a digital facsimile of what people want to be real. If your life is messed up, you can pretend otherwise with your online persona. Why fix your problems when you can project to the world a digital life that isn’t real, but that can replace reality with fiction?

• Daniel Henninger argued in a Wall Street Journal column last week that the meltdown of ObamaCare — specifically the delay in its implementation announced recently — and these other items prove that the idea of Big Government is imploding. “Whether ObamaCare or the border fence, Washington is winding down into a black hole of its own making,” Henninger writes. “The debate’s over. Liberalism will be swept into this vortex, too.” I’m not so sure. ObamaCare is a huge mess, but it’s not going away. People were duped into thinking they can get something for nothing and many expect ObamaCare to be just another version of liberal welfare. ObamaCare may prove to be a tipping point, however, in that it brings to the fore just how badly broken and out of touch our federal government has become.

So what is the common thread in all of this? It’s this thought: At the same time many Americans are less engaged in the world around them, distracted by digital and celebrity culture, our federal government is expanding its reach into our lives in very pervasive ways. From the NSA spying to IRS bullying to ObamaCare taking our money, the muscles of our federal system are expanding as if on steroids.

Unfortunately, Henninger is wrong. The era of big government isn’t spiraling down into a vortex of history’s dustbin. It’s growing and is more arrogant than ever.

That’s not because of a dark conspiracy like some from the political right would argue. It’s because of the simultaneous cascade of human events has led us to this point.

Connect the dots. The void left by our disconnected and disinterested culture is being filled by the expansion of government snooping and control. And to think that big government won’t misuse its expanding power in nefarious ways is to ignore the last 2,000 years of human history.

When future generations look back a this time, that is what they will see, even if today we cannot see it for ourselves.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.

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